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Alf Wiltshire
Stalactites For the Home (2001)

Alf Wiltshire's first volume follow many recent appearances in magazines; it marks an extraordinary debut by a poet owing nothing to the literary mainstream.

The kick of Alf Wiltshire's poetry is its astonishing freshness - if you said new-minted he'd offer you a choc-chip. The linguistic inventiveness - dazzlingly out of synch with impacted trendies - stems from a delight in words, concepts, puns, as they bounce off the business of living. If Emily Dickinson was visited by Graucho Marx and not thrown out of the parlour, these serious larks might have soared up afterwards. It's not simply Dickinson - with her unmatched cognitive originality - but the tradition of uncluttered originals that Wiltshire invites comparison with; Stevie Smith, even on occasion Laura Riding at her most benign. Wiltshire brings to his poetry too, the discipline of a painter whose eye on the typogrophy of his poems figures the inventiveness, even invectives, of his most serious work. It's because of his 3D work that he comes to poetry with a Douanier-like angle to the universeSimon Jenner

ISBN 1-902731-10-7

Alf Wiltshire was born in Portsmouth in 1965 and studied at Portsmouth College of Art. His most recent exhibition was at the e.m. space gallery in Brighton. He is in addition, a practising musician and songwriter.

He started writing poetry seriously in 1996 whilst living in London, and his work has recently begun to appear in magazines and anthologies - in Poetry Now, Anchor Books and United Press.